Carlos Guestrin

Career

Guestrin's previous positions include the Finmeccanica Associate Professorship at Carnegie Mellon University and the Amazon Professorship of Machine Learning in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Guestrin co-founded Turi, Inc., known earlier as GraphLab and Dato, which built a platform for developers and data scientists to build and deploy intelligent applications.¹

After Apple acquired Turi, Guestrin served as Apple's Senior Director of Machine Learning and AI. Guestrin is now a Professor in Stanford's Computer Science Department, holds the Fortinet Founders Professorship, and is a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and a member of Bio-X. Guestrin is also a former member of DARPA's Information Sciences and Technology (ISAT) advisory group.¹

Research and open-source work

Guestrin's early systems work includes GraphLab, a framework for expressing parallel machine learning algorithms, introduced in a 2010 paper and extended to distributed cloud settings in 2012. Guestrin's teams went on to release open-source projects including XGBoost, LIME, Apache TVM, MXNet, Turi Create, GraphLab/PowerGraph, SFrame and GraphChi.⁴⁵¹

With Tianqi Chen, Guestrin wrote the 2016 paper describing XGBoost, a scalable end-to-end tree boosting system, and with Marco Tulio Ribeiro and Sameer Singh the 2016 paper introducing LIME, which explains an individual prediction of any classifier by learning a simple model around it. Guestrin is also a co-author of the 2018 TVM paper on an optimizing compiler that brings deep learning workloads to a wide range of hardware.²³⁶

Teaching

At Stanford, Guestrin taught Machine Learning (CS 229) in the autumn and Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (CS 281) in the spring in each academic year from 2023–24 to 2025–26, and advises master's and doctoral students in computer science.¹

Work and contributions

• XGBoost Open-source code

  Co-author with Tianqi Chen of "XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System" (2016); the Stanford profile lists XGBoost among the open-source projects released by Guestrin's team.²¹⁷

• LIME Published research

  Co-author of "Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier (2016), which introduced LIME for explaining individual predictions of any classifier.³¹

• Apache TVM Open-source code

  Co-author of "TVM: An Automated End-to-End Optimizing Compiler for Deep Learning" (2018), which presents a compiler that makes deep learning workloads portable across CPUs, GPUs and accelerators; the Stanford profile lists Apache TVM among the team's open-source releases.⁶¹

• GraphLab Open-source code

  Co-author of "GraphLab: A New Framework for Parallel Machine Learning" (2010) and of the 2012 follow-up on Distributed GraphLab for machine learning in the cloud.⁴⁵

Timeline

1. Jun 25, 2010Co-authored the GraphLab paper, a framework for parallel machine learning.⁴
2. Apr 26, 2012Co-authored the Distributed GraphLab paper on machine learning in the cloud.⁵
3. Feb 16, 2016Co-authored the LIME paper on explaining the predictions of any classifier.³
4. Mar 9, 2016Co-authored the XGBoost paper on a scalable tree boosting system with Tianqi Chen.²
5. Feb 12, 2018Co-authored the TVM paper on an end-to-end optimizing compiler for deep learning.⁶
6. 2023Taught Machine Learning (CS 229) at Stanford in the autumn quarter of the 2023–24 academic year.¹

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Senior Director of Machine Learning and AI, Apple¹
• Amazon Professor of Machine Learning, Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington¹
• Finmeccanica Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University¹
• Co-founder, Turi, Inc. (formerly GraphLab and Dato)¹

Honors and recognition

• IJCAI Computers and Thought Award · International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence¹
• Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) · United States Government¹
• ONR Young Investigator Award · Office of Naval Research¹
• NSF CAREER Award · National Science Foundation¹
• Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship · Alfred P. Sloan Foundation¹
• IBM Faculty Fellowship · IBM¹

Where they work

• Stanford University 40 people in the wiki

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